Hitesh S. Vaghani
Roll no. - 21
SEM - III
Paper no. – 12
Year – 2010-11
Topic: The Vocation Of the Researcher
Submitted to Dr.Dilip Barad
Department of English,
Bhavnagar University.
The Vocation Of the Researcher
The critic’s business is primary with the literary work itself with its structure, style and content of ideas. Scholars, on the other hand, are more concerned with the facts attending its genesis and subsequent history. While facts have a certain charm in themselves, as every history-minded person knows, the scholar values them in direct proportion to the help they afford- at once or in prospect- in illuminating specific pieces of literature and the interaction of many works that constitutes what is called literary history. They scholar’s eye is rather like the poet’s–not, to be sure, “in a fine frenzy rolling.”
Here is a hamlet, here is a lyric by Shelley, here is a great expectation. Each is intelligible in itself, and any attentive reader can derive immense pleasure from it. But almost every literary work is attended by a host of outside circumstances that, once we expose and explore them, suffer it with additional meaning.
Sainte-beeves’ critical axiomatic arbre, tel fruit “like the tree, like the fruit.” Is a bland oversimplification, to be sure, but the fact remains that behind the book is a man or woman whose character and experience cannot be overlooked in many effort to establish what the book really says. The quality of the imagination, the genetic and psychological factors that shaped a writer’s personality and determined the atmosphere of his or her inner being, the experiences, large and small. That fed the store from which such an artist in words drew the substance of art: all these must be sought, examined, and weighed if we are to comprehend the meaning of a text.
Private influences are involved, authors. Whether conformists or rebels, are the products of time and place, their mental set fatefully determined by the social and cultural environment. To understand a book, we must also understand the manifold socially derived attitudes-the morality, the myths, the assumptions, the biases- that it reflects or embraces. T.S.Eliot in his seminal essay on “tradition and individual talent”, has his complete meaning alone. His significance his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.
Literary research, then, is devoted for one thing, to the enlightenment of criticism- which may or may not take advantage of the proffered information. It seeks to illuminate the work of art as it really is and –the difference may be considerable as it was to its first audience; equally, it tries to see the writer as he really was, his cultural heritage and the people for whom he wrote as they really were. But while this is unquestionably its major purpose, it has at least one other important function, literary history constitutes one of the strands of which the history of civilization itself is woven. Like its sister didciplines of musicology and art history. It finds its material in the vast array of records we have inherited of the imaginative side of human experience- in its case, the representation in language of that experience. Literature preserves for us, for example, the poignancies of the medieval aspiration toward heaven though held down by mortal chains: the excitement of the renaissance awareness of the splendors that environ western mankind in the here and now; the cool and candid re-estimate of the world and the human self that the eighteenth century made under the auspices of revolutionary science and skeptical philosophy; and the spiritual chiaroscuro of wasteland and earthly paradise, the bewildering series of shocks and recoveries, to which modern society has been subjected in the past two centuries. Literature, then is an eloquent artistic document, infinitely varied, of mankind’s journey: the autobiography of the race’s soul.
Finally, there are the unmeasurable but intensely real personal satisfaction that literary research affords men and women of a certain temperament the sheer joy of finding out things that have previously been unknown and thus of increasing, if but by a few grains, the aggregate of human knowledge.
As a consequence of this recent dramatic expansion of the scope of literary interest, it is certain that, given a fair degree of imagination, originality of approach, solidity of learning, and the wish and the will to see works of literary art and their creators from new perspectives, everyone called to the profession will discover amply rewarding projects.
America during the past half century or so, most literary research has been done by academic people, and publishing the results of research has provided the traditional boost up the professional ladder. Unfortunately, the notorious cliché “publish or perish” still describes the attitude or many college and university administrations charged with deciding the fate of young untenured faculty members. The validity of such a criterion for promotion and tenure remains, as it has been for many years, a hotly debated issue. A three-word siogan, of course, grotesquely oversimplifies what is, in truth, a complicated academic situation and an equally complicated relationship between published scholarship and the purposes of higher education. Any external pressure to write scholarly books and articles is pernicious not only because. It may well divert a career from its natural course, thus causing a good deal of personal unhappiness, but because scholarship performed under duress is seldom very good scholarship. Indeed, it is to the “publish or perish” mentality that we can attribute the present bloated condition of the annual bibliographies and the appearance, in the proliferating journals, of a lamentable amount of incompetent, pretentious, or trivial writing that should have been intercepted somewhere between the typewriter or personal computer and the press. Furthermore, and perhaps worst of all, this mentality falsifies the whole rationale of scholarship, placing it on a crass mercenary basis whereas, it if deserves to be supported in a humanistic society. Its practice must be motivated by altruism.
… I am not against research. I practice it. I honor it, I love it. But a taste for literary research is something special. It is not the same thing as delight in reading, or delight in introducing others to the pleasures of reading or the pleasures of writing. We do well to encourage literary research. We do in to impose it as a requirement for promotion and status in the teaching profession. Literary research is a privilege, deserving of no reward except the writer’s joy in his article, his book, his public utterance of his precious thought.
Similar sentiments were expressed a decade later by William d. Schaefer, executive director of the modern language association of America, “during that critical period of the 1960’s our record was flawless in that, as a profession, we managed to do everything wrong and nothing right… the stupidest thing we did and this was not forgivable because its implications were and are so ugly, was to perpetuate a rewards system based on publication… what should have been a natural and healthy act, sharing ideas with colleagues through print, became unnatural, sick what should have remained student papers or notes for undergraduate lectures became ‘articles’ in which, in emulation of the sciences, we more often that not pretended to ‘solve’ literature rather than to interpret, understand, and appreciate it.’
A few business and professional men do literary research in their spare time is the best possible evidence of the pleasure scholarship affords people who have nothing else to gain from it. They are scholars for the same reason that T.S.Eliot, a publisher Wallace stevens, an insurance executive, and William carlos Williams, a pediatrician, were poets. What are the chief qualities of mind and temperament that go to make up a successful and happy scholar?
Journalism, more specifically the work of the investigative reporter; also calls for resourcefulness-knowing were to go for one’s information and how to obtain it, the ability to recognize and follow up leads, and tenacity in pursuit of the facts. Both professions, moreover, require organizational skill, the ability to put facts together in a pattern that is clear and, if controversy is involved persuasive.
Ideal researchers must love literature for its own sake, that is to say, as an art. They must be insatiable readers, and the earlier they have acquired that passion, the better. The kind of work involved in meaningful literary study requires the peculiar impetus and intellectual sympathies that only devotion to an art, and a desire to share it with others, can provide. In her presidential address at the modern language association’s annual convention in 1980, Helen vendler took her text from the end of worldsworth’s prelude: “what we have have loved, /others will love, and we will teach them how.” That same dedication infuses one’s activity as a professional scholar. How to value concision and clarity over obscurity and evasiveness; how to appreciate a new critical vocabulary when it brings energy or insight into our world.
In the second place, researchers must have a vivid sense of history: the ability to cast themselves back into another age. They must be able to adjust their intellectual sights and imaginative responds to the systems of thought and the social and cultural atmosphere that prevailed in fourteenth-century England or early twentieth century America. Byrne was spinning out his oriental romances. Otherwise, they cannot comprehend the current attitudes or artistic assumptions that guided an author as he or she set pen to paper. At the same time, scholars must retain their footing in the twentieth century for the sake of the indispensable perspective the historian needs.
Unlike the natural sciences, however literary research tolerates to a degree the subjective impression as is inevitable in discipline that deals with the human consciousness and the art it produces. But as assemblers and assayers of historical facts, literary scholars need to be as rigorous in their method as scientists. And indeed, a background in science is almost as good preparation for literary research as is one in law of newspaper work, because some of the same qualities are required; intellectuacuriosity, shrewdness, precision, imagination. The lively inventiveness that constantly suggests new hypotheses, new strategies, new sources of information, and when all the data are in, makes possible their accurate interpretation and evaluation.
Scholarship involves a great amount of detail work, in which no margin of error is allowed and over which the analytic intellect must constantly preside. It is no occupation for the impatient or the careless; nor is it one for the easily fatigued. Scholars must not only be capable of hard, often totally fruitless work-they must actually relish it. “the test of a vocation,” the aphorist essayist Logan Pearsall smith once wrote,” is the love of the drudgery it involve.” The researcher pays. For every exultant discovery with a hundred hours of monotonous, eye-searing labor. Even despite technological advances in information storage and retrieval, there are numerous bibliographies to be searched, item by item if the indexing is undependable; calendars of manuscripts, took auction records, lists of dissertations. Long files of periodicals to be plowed through; box-full’s of fragile and half-illegible holograph letters to be examined in quest of a single clue; volumes upon volumes of dull reminiscences to be scanned for the appearance of a single name.
Without it the scholar is “lost as words worth put it, “in a gloom of uninspired research.” Human limitations being what they are, the profession has always had its share of members resembling Scott’s dr.dryasdust and George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon.
The words research and scholarship are used interchangeably as is the common practice; much that has been said does far implies a distinction between the two that certainly exists, it not in the letter of present usage, at least in the spirit. It is pithily embodied in a proverb that h.l.mencken attitudes to the lapanese: “ learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass’s back.” One can be a researcher, full of knowledge, without also being a scholar research is the means scholarship the end; research is an occupation, scholarship is a habit of mind and a way of life. Scholars are more than researchers, for while they may be gifted in the discovery and assessment of facts, they are besides, persons of broad and luminous learning.
The observations made on this distinction are those of john Livingston lowers, spoken in 1933 but really dateless: humane scholarship… moves and must move within two worlds at once- the world of scientific method and the world, in whatever degree, of creative art. The postulates of the two are radically different. Research, which is the primary instrument of science, is felt to be the easier and it is also the more alluring. I too have heard the sirens sing, and I know where of I speak, and so we tend to become enamored of the methods, and at times to forget the end; to allow, in a word, the destination of the means to distract us from the very object for which they are employed. And that end is. In the broadest sense of the word, interpretation. The interpretation. In the light of all that our researches can reveal, of the literature which is our professional concern.”
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